JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (89 page)

The reason given for the further stripping of agents from the limousine was that the president also didn’t want his limousine security. According to Secret Service documents submitted to the Warren Commission, the president had said “he did not want agents riding on the back of his car.”
[302]

To investigate this claim, researcher Vincent Palamara interviewed a series of former Secret Service agents and White House aides to Kennedy. They all agreed that, on the contrary, “Kennedy did not restrict agents from riding on the rear of the limousine.”
[303]

Agent Gerald A. Behn, the initially cited source of the official Secret Service/Warren Commission claim that JFK stripped away his limousine security, told Palamara the exact opposite:
“I don’t remember Kennedy ever saying that he didn’t want anybody on
the back of the car.”
[304]

Contrary to the Secret Service claim that it had to deal with a difficult president who opposed having agents on his limousine, former agent Robert Lilly said, “Oh, I’m sure he didn’t. He was very cooperative with us once he became President. He was extremely cooperative. Basically, ‘whatever you guys want is the way it will be.’”
[305]

Even agent Floyd Boring, the most frequently used source for the Warren Commission claim, said instead of the president: “He didn’t tell them anything . . . JFK was a very easy-going guy . . . he didn’t interfere with our actions at all.”
[306]

From Palamara’s interviews, it soon became obvious that the withdrawal of agents from the presidential limousine in Dallas “was a Secret Service decision, not a JFK desire as ‘official’ history (Warren Commission/[Jim] Bishop/ [William] Manchester/ Secret Service) has told us all. The Secret Service lied, using JFK as a scapegoat.”
[307]

Besides withdrawing security from Dealey Plaza and the presidential limousine, the Secret Service also planned the turn that slowed Kennedy’s limousine to a crawl. That forced slowdown completed the setup for the snipers in waiting. The Secret Service advance man, Winston G. Lawson, approved the fatal dogleg turn in Dealey Plaza when he and the Dallas Special Agent in Charge, Forrest V. Sorrels, did their dry run over the motorcade route on November 18.
[308]

Thus, not only did the Secret Service plan and coordinate a turn that flagrantly violated its own security rule of a forty-four-mile-an-hour minimum speed for the presidential limousine.
[309]
Through orders from Washington, the agency responsible for the president’s security created a vacuum of security—in Dealey Plaza, all around the presidential limousine, and on the surrounding buildings as well.

Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who helped supervise security for President Eisenhower’s visit to Mexico City, said it was a Secret Service rule for an obviously dangerous site like Dealey Plaza “to order all the windows to be closed and sealed. Put a seal on it that says to anyone working in the building: ‘Do
NOT
open this window.’ Then you say, yes, but how are you going to control maybe hundreds of people? It’s not hard. You put a man on the roof with a radio. You put others in strategic positions with snipers’ rifles. You put another man down in the middle of the plaza on the grass, looking up, and he’s got a radio. If he sees a window open, he broadcasts immediately: ‘third floor, fourth window over.’ The snipers cover the window and one of the team on the roof runs down there, sees why the window’s up—some secretary opened the window to see the President go by—and he says: ‘Close that window!’ And it’s closed. You have radios. It can be done.”
[310]

Yet, as we have seen, the only “Secret Service Agents” in Dealey Plaza when the shots were fired were imposters and killers, bearing false credentials to facilitate their escape and coerce witnesses into handing over vital evidence that would vanish. The vacuum created by orders from Washington was immediately filled. When the president’s security was systematically withdrawn from Dealey Plaza, his assassins moved swiftly into place.

Unaware of Washington’s plans for Dealey Plaza, Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, on hearing the first shot, also moved swiftly. Craig had been following Sheriff Decker’s orders, standing passively with the other deputy sheriffs in front of the courthouse at 505 Main Street. At 12:30 p.m., President Kennedy was driven in his limousine past the courthouse and four feet away from Roger Craig. The limousine turned from Main onto Houston. It finally made the agonizingly slow turn from Houston onto Elm. Then Craig heard a rifle shot. He instinctively broke ranks and began running into Dealey Plaza. Before he could reach the corner, he heard two more shots.
[311]

John Kennedy was already gone, but Roger Craig’s work on his behalf had just begun.

For the next ten minutes, Craig questioned witnesses and looked for bullet marks along the street. While scanning the south curb of Elm Street at 12:40 p.m., he heard a shrill whistle from the opposite side of the street. In an unpublished memoir,
When They Kill a President
, Roger Craig described what he saw when alerted by the whistle:

“I turned and saw a white male in his twenties [whom Craig would later identify, to the dismay of the Warren Commission, as Lee Harvey Oswald] running down the grassy knoll from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository Building. A light green Rambler station wagon was coming slowly west on Elm Street. The driver of the station wagon was a husky looking Latin, with dark wavy hair, wearing a tan wind breaker type jacket. He was looking up at the man running toward him. He pulled over to the north curb and picked up the man coming down the hill. I tried to cross Elm Street to stop them and find out who they were. The traffic was too heavy and I was unable to reach them. They drove away going west on Elm Street.”
[312]

Craig was struck by the two men’s rush to leave the scene of the assassination. Everyone else around him was rushing to the scene to see what they could. Craig thought the incident suspicious enough to report to authorities at the police command post. He ran to the front of the Texas School Book Depository and asked for anyone involved in the investigation. A man on the steps dressed in a gray business suit turned to Craig. He said, “I’m with the Secret Service.”
[313]

Roger Craig gave his information to the man in the suit, naively believing, as he said later, that everyone at the command post was an actual officer. “The Secret Service Agent” seemed strangely uninterested in what Craig had to say about the two departing men. Then his interest suddenly picked up. He began taking notes on his little pad while Craig told him about the station wagon, an automobile whose description Craig would soon learn seemed to correspond to a station wagon then owned by Marina Oswald’s hostess, Ruth Paine.
[314]

Later in the afternoon, Roger Craig learned the Dallas Police were holding a man suspected of involvement in the president’s murder. Craig thought immediately of the man running down the grassy knoll. He phoned the homicide chief, Captain Will Fritz, who asked him to come look at the suspect.

Shortly after 4:30 p.m., Craig looked into Captain Fritz’s office and identified the man being held there as the same man he had seen running down the grassy knoll to the station wagon—Lee Harvey Oswald.
[315]

As Fritz and Craig entered the office together, Fritz said to Oswald, “This man saw you leave.”

Oswald became a little excited. He said, “I told you people I did.”

Fritz said in a soothing tone of voice, “Take it easy, son. We’re just trying to find out what happened.”

Then Fritz asked Oswald, “What about the
car
?”

Oswald leaned forward and put both hands on Fritz’s desk. He said, “That
station wagon
belongs to Mrs. Paine. Don’t try to drag her into this.”

Then he leaned back in his chair. He said in a low voice, “Everybody will know who I am now.”

Craig has emphasized that Oswald made this statement in a dejected tone of voice. He said, “Everybody will know who I am now,” as if his cover had just been blown.
[316]

At this point Fritz ushered Craig from the office. It was too late—for both the government and Roger Craig. Deputy Sheriff Craig had seen and heard too much.

It was also at this time that Captain Fritz received an urgent phone request from Sheriff Decker to come see him immediately. Decker’s need to talk with Fritz in person, not by phone, was so great that the homicide chief suspended his questioning of Oswald so as to travel the fifteen blocks to the sheriff’s office and meet with him privately.
[317]

Why did Decker cause such a strange break at an early, critical stage of Fritz’s questioning of Oswald? In the rush of all the commotion and chaos, when evidence of the assassination had to be gathered quickly, why did Sheriff Decker not just talk on the phone with Captain Fritz instead of having Fritz traipse halfway across town to confer with him in person?
[318]
Apparently the sheriff needed to talk in absolute secrecy with the homicide chief, without any risk of their conversation being overheard on the phone.

Although we do not know what Decker said to Fritz behind closed doors, Penn Jones, Jr., the courageous local journalist who explored Dallas’s darkest alleys, made the observation “that knowledge of the assassination was on a ‘need to know’ basis. When Oswald was not killed in the Texas Theater, and was now in the hands of Captain Will Fritz, did Fritz move into the circle of those who ‘needed to know’?”
[319]

What Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig would testify to in the years ahead, as his piece of the truth of Dallas, was corroborated by a parade of other witnesses. Ed Hoffman had already seen the “suit man” get in a light green Rambler station wagon, which drove him out of the parking lot by the Depository. Additional witnesses saw either the Nash Rambler or someone suspicious who would be picked up by the station wagon. Together with Craig’s testimony, these witnesses’ stories have given us a picture of the Rambler’s function as an escape vehicle—which leads in turn to an insight into the enigma of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Carolyn Walther, a worker in a dress factory, stood on Houston Street at the edge of Dealey Plaza a few minutes before the president’s arrival. As she waited for the motorcade, Walther looked up at the Texas School Book Depository. On one of its upper floors,
[320]
she saw a man in a white shirt leaning out the southeast corner window with a rifle in his hands pointed down, as if for all the world to see. The man, who had blonde or light-brown hair, was looking down the street where the motorcade was about to come around the corner—a posed, public portrait of the assassin waiting for his target to come into view.
[321]

However, Carolyn Walther also spied a second, more mysterious man, standing by the man with the rifle. The second man’s head was blocked from view by the dirty glass in the upper half of the window. She could see his body from his waist to his shoulders. Her clothing worker’s eye took note of the headless man’s apparel. Before she turned her eyes to the approaching motorcade, she had seen that the second man in the window was wearing a brown suit coat.
[322]

Up the street from Carolyn Walther was another witness about to see a man in such a coat. Standing four feet from the Texas School Book Depository was James Richard Worrell, Jr., a twenty-year-old high school dropout. After the president was driven past him, Worrell heard a shot. He looked straight up at the building over him. He saw the barrel of a rifle sticking out a window in the fifth or sixth floor, pointing in the direction of the limousine. It seemed to be firing—an assassin’s weapon in public view. Worrell looked ahead. He saw the president slumping down in his seat.
[323]

Terrified, Worrell pivoted and ran up the street as he heard a gun fire two more times. After he heard a fourth shot (thereby contradicting what would be the government’s three-shot case against Oswald) and continued running, Worrell paused a block away to catch his breath. He looked back.
[324]
He saw a man in a sport coat running out the back of the Texas School Book Depository. As the man ran, Worrell could see his coat open and flapping in the breeze. James Worrell turned. Like the man in the sport coat, he fled the scene.
[325]

A third witness connected the man in the coat with a Rambler station wagon. High above Carolyn Walther, James Worrell, and the president in his limousine was Richard Randolph Carr, an unemployed steelworker who was ascending the stairway of the partially constructed new courthouse building. He was looking for the foreman on the ninth floor to inquire about work. When he reached the sixth floor, Richard Carr stopped for a rest. He gazed across at the Texas School Book Depository. He saw a man looking out the second window from the southeast corner of the top floor. Carr later described the man as “a heavy set individual, who was wearing a hat, a tan sport coat and horn-rimmed glasses.”
[326]